Saturday, 14 March 2015

I don't know why, but every night I tend to prioritize escaping over sleep. Not work. No socializing. Some form of calm. Movies. Random tracks of music. Something that lets my mind fly.

Today I ended up stumbling upon Educating Rita. I won't spoil it for you, it's a great movie. But it got me thinking about all the fragile relationships that we set, that end up making the memories so dear to us and so bittersweet when they end. All of those people that we remember fondly, that end up being nothing but passerby's in the bigger picture. The fragility is what makes it so important. Half the people I know today, we will never run into each other years later. I wish I could get a follow up on what happened to quite a few that I used to know. Yet I wonder if I did get a follow up would it make it any less special?

I remember playing Perfect World at a particularly tough time in my life. Yet it was people that made it special for me. I remember meeting a person while leveling who decided to stick around because both of us had 5 letters in our name. The thing is, his wasn't even supposed to be spelled that way. He misspelled his, I chose the one that I normally hide behind. I remember the first guild that I was in crumbling down. I remember choosing a guild name. I remember doing all the boring leveling and eventually being flown over the higher level areas, because I was bored and they looked so pretty. People even took me dungeoning. Though I don't think that I understood what a dungeon was, but I tagged along anyway. I stopped playing shortly after those people stopped. The game lost taste. I knew some of their names on facebook but I decided to throw those away. I wonder how did they get on with their lives. Did they fix what was broken? Where did they end up going? Who did they become?

I wonder same for those few friends that I had in my primary school. About the first boy to have a crush on me. About the one that just didn't show up for a date one day. I wonder who they became to be. What is their worldview. Who are their loved ones. What things do they enjoy now. Yet I remember them. And perhaps those memories are made better by the fact that we don't reconnect with them.

They came. They gave us something to remember. We all separated paths as better beings. And unknowingly we will do it again and again. With some we'll part ways willingly. With others we won't know that they chose to until they're already gone. Yet it makes all the memories that you make even more precious.

Friday, 13 March 2015

watch this videoAnd now tell me does it seem normal for you for one out of two servers to only have 17 people in the middle of the day? To have no economy?Of course it's not! And there's suggestions. "change your payment model", "close the server down". Nope. Nothing is done for 5 months now. And the best thing is that when people see this and then leave (mostly because Wildstar launched free trials) they get badmouthed.for example:"I swear someone is paying people to make ludicrous statements like this post.I am having such a blast in WS every day. "

after I uploaded that video, I was told "oh what a jerk you are!", "you're on at the wrong time!". Now I'm sorry, but even private servers of MMOs have more than 17 people playing on a megaserver at 1pm GMT+0. I will record some more at 6 pm just for them, but still... The fact that the game is dying is sad. The fact that Carbine is doing nothing about it is sad. But the fact that people will call you a jerk for just pointing out that this is not normal is the most frustrating part.

And just today it appeared on steam as early access! The sad part is that this game will be drowned by such as Five Nights At Freddy's 3, even though a lot more thought has been put into it and all the reviews are positive. Why? Mostly because nobody knows that it exists.

Do you like vampire games? More notably Vampire the Masquerade Redemption or Bloodlines? Then please look into Bloodlust. You don't have to buy it. But watch a few broadcasts of it. Maybe pick up the demo to play. Because this is the first good vampire game in years! And made by only one person that seems to be super cooperative on the forums.

want to hear more?

-In the game you have 3 classes (Witch, thief and warrior) and two races - vampire and half human.- campaign can last anywhere between 10 to 30 hours, though it could be 100+ if you get lost in dungeon exploration.- lots of secret rooms and random elements. I've seem to have found completely different places to other people that played it.- minion system! Make yourself a vampire buddy! They're dumb as rocks, but quite useful!

and most importantly, it's bringing the vampire RPG game sub genre back. So adopt a vampire game developer today and ensure that one day more games like Bloodlines come!

Wednesday, 18 February 2015

I've been posting on Guild Wars 2 forums again (after Wildstar PvP servers fell I moved back to Guild Wars 2. My guild is now a small community stretched between WoW, Wildstar and Guild Wars 2 with me personally leading the Guild Wars 2 section) and one of the posts really got me worked up.

Bottom line, one guy decided to post this. And all I could think of was "don't categorize, ever". So mistakes that the blog post makes

1. They're obviously against certain types of people and guilds, even though there's absolutely nothing wrong with them. For example helper guilds.2. They're forgetting the human factor. I know plenty of people in plenty of guilds and there's no inherently bad type of guild. Everyone tends to band together to do what they want to do to and to play the way that they want to play.3. No conclusion drawing. Whether they paint a negative or a positive image, there's no "therefore" after these descriptions. No advise, no point about improving guilds, no suggestions, no opinion as to why they're writing it. Just bias observations. It's literally a blog post about a guy going "I don't like it, because they're not my guild and I'm the only one normal!".4. So many generalizations and so much prejudice. Examples include:

"they often immediately try to get attention of the GMs, etc. by producing “Quality” fan-site content. Often, this content is pieced together by using pirated software (After Effects, Photoshop, etc.) and media packs provided by the publisher. if you try to prod into what software they use, they will often either say a free variant of the software they actually use, or just say they use the software, just without saying it’s pirated until you start asking questions about the price of the software"

...What?

"and this often devolves the guild into an MMORPG Hopper or known as a Multi-MMO Guild."

how is being a community a downside?

"In this type of guild, it is not uncommon to find hardcore people who will level up with that guild’s resources just to leave the guild when they hit level cap to join a hardcore guild. This often is due to the guild’s inability to be “Frontal” or “Aggressive” with keeping their members. Some members of a social guild will attempt to be “Aggressive”, but often fail to do so, because of their social instability and being “Anti-Social” when they think they aren’t."

that's just insulting.

And then this guy has the guts to call his own guild normal and saying that that's precisely why they're not popular...People like this make me want for blogs to be not a thing so that I could directly respond with what kind of pompous prick they are. The problem with the Internet is that they probably don't even care. After all why wouldn't you insult majority of people when you can get away with it?

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

It's 2:20AM. Yesterday we started semester two of my second year of uni. I'm increasingly unsure of what I want to do with my life. There's that part of me that just wants to make and make and make based on topic life. There's that part of me that wants to show the experience of a sleepless night, the doubt, the emotions, the kids in hospital beds, the human things. And then there's a part of me that's completely at a loss how to put my heart into something virtual. There's the part of me that doesn't have the right skills and the part of me that's very indifferent.

Did I even choose the right field? Is this where there's space for me? I guess we'll find out in a year and a half.

And yet everything is... So not what I would like it to be. Between forced pretentiousness, between creating what they call "art" and lost between others interests I feel out of fumes. And then there's topics that nobody would ever touch. We're encouraged to research but we're not given the freedom.

How about as a research topic - what virtual lives mean to us? How much heart do we put into our little fantasy toons? How much more real people are when they get to hide behind a different face? How much time do we spend orchestrating it and can it be counted for a real world experience of some kind?But... It's not something that would ever be written about in an actual paper. Rather something majority of industries would choose to ridicule.

MMO of my choice is back to Guild Wars 2 and The Sims 4 is not that bad. Why do all of the announcements, games and expansions have to come out when I'm busy and/ or broke?

What's more important, the life of leisure and happiness on limited security or to fall apart somewhere where I couldn't feel human?